Unequal opportunity for low-income undergrads at area colleges

DONNA FISHER, THE MORNING CALL

Muhlenberg College student Leah Boecker of Plainview, N.Y. reads on campus on Wednesday. Muhlenberg in Allentown has a low number (8 percent) of Pell-Grant eligible, or lower-income, students. Other Lehigh Valley-area instutions, such as Kutztown University (32 percent), have a higher percentage of Pell-Grant eligible students.

Muhlenberg College student Leah Boecker of Plainview, N.Y. reads on campus on Wednesday. Muhlenberg in Allentown has a low number (8 percent) of Pell-Grant eligible, or lower-income, students. Other Lehigh Valley-area instutions, such as Kutztown University (32 percent), have a higher percentage of Pell-Grant eligible students. (DONNA FISHER, THE MORNING CALL)

Deidgre Green, the 2011 valedictorian of Martin Luther King High School in Philadelphia, would have been a strong applicant to just about any college.

But she applied to just a few, and they were mostly state schools because they were less expensive than private schools. In the end, she picked Kutztown University, since the federal Pell Grant she expected to receive would go further there.

"You get a better bang for your buck," said Green, now a senior majoring in public administration.

Many others make the same cold calculation. At Kutztown, 32 percent of undergraduates in the 2012-13 academic year were Pell Grant recipients — one of the highest proportions among four-year colleges and universities in the greater Lehigh Valley area.

The $32 billion Pell Grant program is the U.S. government's main financial aid for low-income students, benefiting more than one in three undergraduates, or about 10 million total nationwide. Recipients can get up to $5,730 a year.

Other area schools with high numbers of Pell-eligible and thus low-income students included Cedar Crest College (43 percent) in Allentown, Penn State Lehigh Valley (36 percent) in Center Valley and Moravian College (30 percent) in Bethlehem, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education.

On the low end of the spectrum are Muhlenberg College in Allentown, where 8 percent of undergrads were Pell-eligible, and Lafayette College in Easton, where 11 percent were. Muhlenberg and Lafayette also are among the most expensive schools in the region, with tuition and fees costing more than $40,000 a year, though both offer programs to assist lower-income students.

Colleges and universities have catered to children of the wealthy going back to the early days of Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, founded in 1636. The families that didn't need to keep their sons and daughters home to help tend to the farm were the ones with money; they could afford tuition and contribute to endowments.

This bias, however, has come under increased scrutiny recently, amid a broader dialogue about the country's class divide. Rather than serving as engines of social mobility, many colleges and universities, especially elite private institutions, are instead perpetuating and perhaps even exacerbating class divisions from one generation to the next, according to some higher education watchdogs.

"Any of these schools with high tuition and a very low percentage of Pell Grant students are not committed to serving low-income students. They are committed to maximizing tuition revenue," said Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington, D.C. He likens schools with few Pell-eligible students to "gated communities" that "don't want the riff-raff of the larger American society to sully their doors."

Such segregation along socio-economic lines is, in part, by design: Acceptance policies at some schools give extra points to applicants with wealthy parents, leaving would-be students whose parents don't earn as much money at a distinct disadvantage. And, Mortensen noted, this is set against a backdrop of ever-rising college costs saddling many young adults and their parents with crushing debt.

"Our higher education system is enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor," he said. "I'm terribly concerned about what it means for our future."

Recruitment

At Muhlenberg and Lafayette, officials see things differently. They say Pell data offer but a partial and possibly misleading picture of a school's commitment to socio-economic diversity.

"I'm not sure a 'good guys bad guys' approach is constructive or helpful," Muhlenberg Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Christopher Hooker-Haring said. "It's kind of a simplistic approach to a much more complicated question."

Muhlenberg, he said, awarded $36 million in private scholarship money this year — 70 percent in need-based aid, 30 percent in merit aid — helping to defray costs for many middle- and lower-income students who just missed qualifying for the Pell. Across the campus, 85 percent of students benefit from at least some financial aid, he said.

Similarly, at Lafayette, Vice President for Enrollment Management Gregory MacDonald touted a recent increase in students who, though not necessarily Pell-eligible, come from families with incomes of less than $100,000. He said such students now account for 12 percent-15 percent of incoming classes.

"We have chosen to use a broader approach in making sure Lafayette is accessible as possible to as many families as possible," he said in an email.

Muhlenberg and Lafayette also have recruitment programs targeting applicants from low-income, urban areas. Lafayette, for example, has entered into partnerships with a handful community-based organizations such as Achievement First, a network of 29 charter schools in five Northeastern cities.

These efforts have helped the college make "significant progress in diversifying [its] applicant pool in recent years," MacDonald said.

Muhlenberg, for its part, recruits across the five boroughs of New York and as far away as Buffalo and Syracuse, N.Y., as a partner to Say Yes to Education, a nonprofit group whose goal is to increase the high school and college graduation rates of inner-city youth.

The challenge, Hooker-Haring said, is persuading those students to apply in the first place, especially when the college isn't well-known outside of eastern Pennsylvania. "You got to get out and work harder and reach farther to make parents look beyond that sticker price," he said.

Generally, Pell recipients come from families representing the bottom 40 percent of the nation's income distribution — and the lower their income, the larger the grant.

In the 2012-13 academic year, 283,000 Pennsylvania students received a total of nearly $1 billion in Pell grants, according to an annual report from the Education Department. About half of the students and money went to public schools, and about a quarter of the students and money to private nonprofit schools and for-profit institutions each.

Cost

When Hamburg, Berks County, resident Erin Bower was making her choice for college, she was tempted by York College, a small private school in York. Bower had been a member of the National Honor Society in high school, and York offered a merit scholarship that would have covered some, but not all of its $27,000 cost, including room and board.

"It wasn't enough," she recalled. "I couldn't have made up the difference."

So instead, Bower, too, chose Kutztown, where she is now a junior majoring in social work. Though even there, the $5,680 Pell Grant she received this year is not enough. By the time she's done with college, she expects to owe tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

"It's not a little amount of money, but it's better than it could be," she said of the debt she is accruing. "I figured I would get the same education that I would in one of those [private] schools … I think I made a good choice."

Cost may also help to explain why Cedar Crest and Moravian, as well as DeSales University in Center Valley, where 27 percent of students received Pell Grants, enroll so many more Pell-eligible students than Muhlenberg and Lafayette.

Though Cedar Crest, Moravian and DeSales are private schools, they are — with tuition and fees in the low- to mid-$30,000 range — considerably less expensive than Muhlenberg and Lafayette. And Cedar Crest takes the additional step of offering a scholarship of at least $12,000 to every student admitted.

Yet cost is, at most, only part of the story, according to officials at Cedar Crest, Moravian and DeSales, who spoke of a deep-seated commitment to making education accessible.

"Serving a diverse population of women is our mission," said Mary-Alice Ozechoski, Cedar Crest's vice president of student affairs and traditional enrollment. "That's what we live and breathe."

Cedar Crest, she noted, is a founding member of Raise.me, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-supported program. Traditionally, students are awarded scholarships only after applying to college as high school seniors. But Raise.me allows students to secure support earlier — throughout their high school years — to help them decide where to apply in the first place.

"We are working all different angles to get people to at least consider us," Ozechoski said.

At Moravian, recruiters get to know every applicant and his or her parents, even going so far as to "friend" them on Facebook, according to Vice President of Enrollment Management Steven Soba. He said such a personal approach may be particularly appealing to low-income families for whom college is a particularly daunting prospect.

And at DeSales, a Roman Catholic institution, recruiters draw applicants from inner-city Catholic high schools that serve as a natural pipeline to low-income populations. DeSales Vice President of Student Life Gerard Joyce also noted the university's DREAMS program, which allows prospective applicants to spend a week at the school, paired with a DeSales student mentor, at virtually no cost.

"The whole point is, college is possible," he said. "We're doing this so you know you have options here."

Need-blind

Cedar Crest, Moravian and DeSales also have "need-blind" acceptance policies, meaning they do not take into consideration students' ability to pay when evaluating their applications. Rather, they judge applicants solely on merit, and only after acceptance do they turn to financial aid questions.

Muhlenberg and Lafayette, on the other hand, do take into consideration the financial resources of students and their parents. This means a mediocre applicant may be accepted because of his or her family's wealth, while an equivalent student with less money would be rejected.

Such was the case in about 8 percent of Muhlenberg's admissions last year, and in 10 percent-15 percent of Lafayette's, according to school officials.

"Financial aid is a balancing act. What you are trying to do is award your aid in a way that is influencing both access and choice," Hooker-Haring said, explaining why Muhlenberg isn't need-blind.

"The challenge for colleges is, somebody has to pay for this experience. Colleges don't have limitless budgets," he said. "Somebody has to be willing to pay for the experience. In this economy, families that have means to do that are a rarer and rarer group."

According to Patrick Callan, the founding president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in San Jose, Calif., higher education is no longer the great equalizer it was once considered to be. Part of the problem, he said, is an expansion of merit aid, which has come at the expense of need-based aid and typically rewards students who already can afford school.

The financial logic is a matter of basic math: Say, $30,000 could fully support one needy student's tuition and fees. Financially, a school gets nothing for that. But the same money could be divided into three merit scholarships, luring three students who would still have to pay, probably with the help of student loans, $20,000 each, contributing $60,000 to the school's bottom line.

"This is a national trend. … They are using aid as a recruitment device," Callan said of schools. "It sounds like an arcane academic discussion of how higher education is financed, but it's part of this larger national conversation about social mobility and the future of the middle class."

Among local schools, Lehigh University in Bethlehem falls in between the cluster with fewer Pell-eligible students and the cluster with more. In 2013-14, 15 percent of Lehigh undergrads received Pell Grants. (The figure might be slightly higher, according to school officials, if it included Pell-eligible students awarded athletic scholarships that preempt other financial aid, including Pell Grants.)

Though Lehigh, where tuition and fees cost $43,500 last year, ranks alongside Muhlenberg and Lafayette as the region's most expensive schools, it has need-blind acceptance like Cedar Crest, Moravian and DeSales.

Last year, Lehigh dispersed $67 million in scholarship money. Most of that — 92 percent — was need-based aid, Director of Admissions Bruce Bunnick said.

"That's an institutional priority, because we are trying to make the education affordable," he said.

Like other area colleges and universities, Lehigh has instituted programs and entered into partnerships with community-based organizations to bolster the ranks of low-income students.

"Every year we are very cognizant of the absolute necessity of making the class diverse," Bunnick said. "We want this institution and campus to be an accurate reflection of the society our students are going to inherit.

"This is an issue for the entirety of higher education across the county," he said, "We know there's room for growth, and we are trying to move that needle."